The present invention is related to techniques and mechanisms for providing access control for computer resources, such as media objects.
Traditional access control systems use manually maintained Access Control Lists (ACL's) and rigidly define the protected resources, usually by describing their storage location (e.g., a UNIX file system directory). For example, particular user groups may be given access to a particular file system directory. Although these ACL's can provide useful mechanisms for controlling user access, there continues to be a need for improved mechanisms for creating and utilizing ACL's.